Dancing Revolution

Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History

Christopher J. Smith

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051234
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Artes escénicas

Throughout American history, patterns of political intent and impact have linked the wide range of dance movements performed in public places. Groups diverse in their cultural or political identities, or in both, long ago seized on street dancing, marches, open-air revival meetings, and theaters, as well as in dance halls and nightclubs, as a tool for contesting, constructing, or reinventing the social order.

Dancing Revolution presents richly diverse case studies to illuminate these patterns of movement and influence in movement and sound in the history of American public life. Christopher J. Smith spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities as he delves into a wide range of historical moments. These include the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of Shakers and Ghost Dancers in the First and Second Great Awakenings; creolized antebellum dance in cities from New Orleans to Bristol; the modernism and racial integration that imbued twentieth-century African American popular dance; the revolutionary connotations behind images of dance from Josephine Baker to the Marx Brothers; and public movement's contributions to hip hop, antihegemonic protest, and other contemporary transgressive communities' physical expressions of dissent and solidarity.

Multidisciplinary and wide-ranging, Dancing Revolution examines how Americans turned the rhythms of history into the movement behind the movements.

CHAPTER 1

Sacred Bodies in the Great Awakenings

This chapter explores the ecstatic experiences and transgressive body vocabularies associated with Pentecostal Protestantism, rooted in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and manifested through public worship in the cross-cultural dance synthesis of syncretic communities on the early-nineteenth-century frontier. These examples are contextualized by a brief investigation of the role of kinesthetics and cognition in street dance and in transport experience, for both participants and observers, and the ways in which kinesthetics and cognition collapse the boundary between the two. The experiences of bodies moving in cultural landscapes are relevant here because they help us understand both the strategy and political impact of group motion in the street and also its experiential tactics and religio-psychological appeal.1 These considerations further illuminate our understanding of the kinesthetic appeal of participation in sacred, utopian, popular, and political dance. Sachs Norris says, “Because the wish to belong is essentially human, there is often a joy in giving oneself to the experience of worship or communal dance.”2

In such circumstances, as we will see in the case of the Cumberland Revival on the Kentucky frontier, movement becomes a sacred tool. Because it is both a sonic and a kinesthetic phenomenon, rhythm can be enacted in sounding or visual realms, by sound or by bodies in motion, in a way that melody, for example, is more constrained. Dance is, in turn, one part of the range of kinesthetic bodily responses evoked by rhythm, and its “interactional rhythms” structure both sounding music and bodily functions.3 Thus, elements of dance theory that address cognition and psychology can help us understand the central functional role played by dance in transformational and utopian worship.

In the mid–eighteenth century, impassioned preachers like Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), author of the prototypical and widely influential hellfire-and-brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), and George Whitefield (1714–1770) pioneered an emotional, extravagant, and graphic style of extemporaneous speech.4 They saw themselves not as revolutionaries but as reformers, reclaimers of a more direct and rigorous experience of sanctity that they still believed possible within the frame of Protestant theocracy, and they explicitly condemned dance.5 In the 1740s, it was left to defiant outsiders—itinerant preachers like the notorious James Davenport (1716–1757)—to take the new style of evangelical preaching out of sanctified spaces, into the streets and meadows, and to translate its improvisational emotionalism from speech into movement and song. The visible and audible elements of the resulting physical ecstasy, as detailed by eyewitness reporters like the Reverend Joseph Fish, evoked horrified fascination:

[Davenport] not only gave an unrestrained liberty to noise and outcry, both of distress and joy, in time of divine service, but promoted both with all his might by extending his own voice to the highest pitch, together with the most violent agitations of body, even to the distorting of his features and marring his visage: as if he had aimed, rather, at frightening people out of their senses, than, by solid argument, nervous reasoning and solemn addresses, to enlighten the mind, and perswade them as reasonable men, to make their escape unto Christ. And all this, with a strange, unnatural singing tone, which mightily tended to raise or keep up the affections of weak and undiscerning people, and consequently, to heighten the confusion among the passionate of his hearers. Which odd and ungrateful tuning of the voice, in exercises of devotion, has, from thence, been propagated down to the present day, and is become one of the characteristicks, of a false spirit, and especially of a separate; that sect being almost universally distinguished by such a tone.6

The “unrestrained liberty” with which a preacher like Davenport “extend[ed] his own voice” and “agitated” his body, the “distorting of his features” and “strange, unnatural singing tone” of his voice, simultaneously violated standards of religious decorum and transformed Pentecostal public address, especially in the culturally remote frontiers. Because New England was still dominated by a moneyed Anglican theocracy, there was little space or desire for Davenport’s fundamental public-space challenges to social hierarchy (Edwards and Whitefield, for example, both explicitly condemned the “extremity” of his crowd-based worship), and his challenge lasted less than a year in 1743.7 However, the radical democratization of religious experience implicit in Edwards’s and Whitefield’s midcentury rhetoric, and explicated in Davenport’s bodily challenge (discussed later), played out much more extensively, and with much more lasting impact, upon the southern and western frontiers, in the period between the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Particularly attractive to frontier Presbyterians and to early Baptists and Methodists, and radically inclusive of women and slaves, the theology of preachers like Edwards, Whitefield, and Davenport countenanced “noise,” “enthusiasm,” and—in some cases—censorious opposition to existing power structures.8 The “hysteria” the radical preachers elicited and learned to control became a physical manifestation of the rhetoric of apocalyptic opposition; their street tactics would be borrowed, codified, and exploited by the Sons of Liberty in the decades before the American Revolution.9

The democratized bodily experience of the Great Awakening’s ecstatic public speech, song, emotional expression, and conduct; its literal invasion of public and sacred spaces and, metaphorically, of the assembled bodies (groups and individuals) themselves; and its appeal to frontier sectarian and minority populations, all connect it to later public conduct.10 Edwards himself, though he opposed dance, specifically countenanced noise and was castigated by power elites for his “censoriousness and extemporaneous and itinerant preaching.”11 Inflammatory public speech (sermonizing) was regarded as transgressive, and, while only the most radical evangelicals engaged in ecstatic body behaviors, the very fact of large crowds moving in public spaces—especially when they left the rural countryside and entered urban streets and buildings, under the influence of renegades like Davenport—was itself a kind of danced rebellion. This rebellion reached much further, birthing the “Shaking Shakers” among others, in the first years of the nineteenth century.

It was not Edwards and Whitefield who brought syncretic body practices into Protestant religion; those hellfire preachers, with the exception of a few like Davenport, roundly condemned dance in worship as had the Anglican theocracy. Rather, an unremarked source for “physical enthusiasm” in late-eighteenth-century evangelism was a carryover from Afro-Caribbean dance and worship practices traveling westward from Virginia and Georgia, and possibly eastward from the Mississippi Basin, into the Cumberland Plateau.12 The meeting of Afro-Caribbean and Anglo-European worship practices, which leads to the Shakers (only the best-known of the dancing congregations), is rooted in the sacramental season of frontier camp meetings, on the western watershed between the Appalachians and the Ohio’s tributaries in the last part of the eighteenth century, when Ulster Scots Presbyterianism met Afro-Caribbean and Native American body religions.

Here are the factors that shaped that meeting.

Prologue

The reforming New England preachers of the First Great Awakening, though employing literally inflammatory rhetoric to rekindle religious enthusiasm, opposed sacred dance and bodies-in-motion activity.13 James Davenport provided a test case for their pushback against the liberation of movement as a religio-political strategy; the very fact that Whitefield and others condemned Davenport confirms that they sought theological reform but stopped short of bodily revolution. We may note that their fundamental objection to Davenport was not that he used rhetorical and theatrical techniques borrowed from other evangelists, but that he extended their usage far beyond Anglican zones of control and, most notably, reinjected them into urban contexts.14 Whitefield had revolutionized dramatic preaching by speaking extemporaneously to outdoor crowds at camp meetings in the open air—but Davenport brought those same crowds back into the center of urban life in cities like New London and New Haven.

The parading, singing, preaching, and dancing “enthusiasm” of these crowds, and the Anglican theocracy’s attempt to contain them, are precisely the basis for Davenport’s relevance to this book. His audiences were not contained or sequestered; like the street protestors of the 1960s, discussed later, they moved freely, impulsively, and unpredictably through urban cityscapes. In addition, their demographics skewed young, male, and unmarried; they provide, therefore, a link to the Francophone night-visiting custom of “charivari” or “rough music,” which came down the Mississippi and evolved a Deep South variant called “shivaree,” and they are a prototype both in sociology and in behavior to the transgressive, “noisy” personnel and street tactics of the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s and ’70s, and the audiences and behaviors associated with urban blackface from the 1820s onward.15 When Davenport’s followers in March 1743 made, at his instruction, a bonfire of books on Christopher’s town wharf in New London, he prefigured the street tactics of a range of later dance revolutionaries.16 In his relationship with the theocratic establishment, Davenport thus occupies the same (perhaps unintended or uncontrollable) oppositional “Trickster” posture as would minstrelsy’s George Washington Dixon (1801?-1861), who not only performed and wrote for the blackface stage from the 1820s, but also edited various scandalous, scurrilous, and/or subversive “flash” newspapers from the 1830s.17 In this sense, Davenport in 1740s Connecticut represents a democratizing sacred-context challenge to orthodox hierarchies that was every bit as transgressive as Dixon’s 1820s secular version of the same.

THE FRONTIER

The ecstatic body languages, which are mostly absent from the First Revival, and were castigated by Edwards and Whitefield when employed by the iconoclastic Davenport and his followers reappeared along the trans-Appalachian frontier, especially the southwest watershed of the Cumberland Plateau. These movement practices, which we will subsume under the general umbrella term of sacred dance, appear immediately in the wake of the Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s, when the flight of colonialists, their extended families, and their black and mixed-race households to other Francophone locations (notably New Orleans and Charleston) transformed maritime/riverine spaces all over eastern North America.18 The admixture of Afro-Caribbean cultural influences and practices was widespread, though underreported, and directly impacts the dance practices and communal ecstasy of the Cumberland Revivals ca. 1800–1801.19

KINESTHETICS AND THE COGNITIVE TRANSFORMATIONS OF ECSTASY

Group dance has cognitive and kinesthetic as well as aesthetic implications. The scholar Judith Lynne Hanna, cited already in Chapter 1, situates dance’s communicative efficacy “in its capacity to fully engage the human being.”20 Scholarship like Hanna’s and that of Mary M. Smyth, grounded primarily in ethnographic or anthropological methodologies, suggests that engaging with dance as either participant or observer literally evokes cognitive, kinesthetic, and neuromuscular responses.21 Hence, our understanding of dance as an essential part of the sacred traditions that combined to yield the Cumberland revival—and subsequently as a central practice for the Shaker and Ghost Dance sects which each in their own way reflected the influence of the revivals—is greatly enriched when we recognize that participatory dancing yields what the swing-dance specialist Paul Jordan-Smith calls cathexis—a “raising of energy.”22 The Cumberland Revivalists danced the way they did as a result of both inherited and exchanged cultural perceptions—what dance “meant” and that meaning’s relevance to the sacred—and of cognitive connections because it was physically pleasurable and because it forged cathexis: an emotional experience of communal connection.

LOCALE AND CULTURE CONTACT

These body practices appear within the southwest Appalachian immigrant population of Anglo-Scottish Presbyterians, for whom the summertime festivals of “sacrament season” had been a feature of religious congregation ever since early-eighteenth-century Scotland, and were shared with the various mixed-race groups they encountered.23 On the Kentucky frontier, Presbyterian practices met the evangelizing preaching and radically egalitarian message of salvation central to Baptist and Methodist revivalism. They also met Afro-Caribbean sacred dance, most particularly the complex of worship behaviors known collectively as the ring-shout—walking in a circle, singing, hand-clapping—accounts of which recur across many locations and several centuries.24 The diversity of these communities, and the collapse of social distinction between them during fron...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Callin’ out, around the world …”
• Chapter 1 Sacred Bodies in the Great Awakenings
• Chapter 2 A Tale of Two Cities I: Akimbo Bodies and the English Caribbean
• Chapter 3 Spaces, Whistles, Tags, and Drums: Irruptive Noise
• Chapter 4 A Tale of Two Cities II: Festival and Spectacle in the French Caribbean
• Chapter 5 Utopian Movements and Moments: Shakers and Ghost Dancers
• Chapter 6 Blackface Transformations I: Modernism, Primitivism, and Race
• Chapter 7 Blackface Transformations II: Voyeurism, Identity, and Double-Consciousness
• Chapter 8 Body and Spirit in a Post-1960s World: Hippies, Queens, Punks, and B-Boys
• Chapter 9 9Street Dance and the Dream of Freedom: “It’s an invitation across the nation …”
• Notes
• Index